A few weeks ago my dude showed me a trailer for a new foreign horror movie called “Goodnight Mommy.” It looks pretty freaky – about two little boys whose mother comes home from having a great deal of plastic surgery and her face is all bandaged up. They start to suspect that she’s really not their mother and someone more sinister. We went to go see it at the Lincoln Center Film Society – the same theatre that I went to see It Follows at in the late winter. It’s a super nice, but tiny, theatre. I love going there. Anyways, I digress.
I was expecting a deranged mother, or mother figure, tormenting two young boys. It was, in fact, the opposite. There’s some tension between the mother and one of the twins, Lukas, and she’s less than warm towards the other twin, Elias. She only serves breakfast to one child, only tucks one child in, and has no idea who her sons are talking about when they’re playing a game (the one where you guess what the post-it on your forehead says) and they say she’s a person with two children.
It’s odd. It’s really, really weird. And then things get graphic. There’s a considerable amount of blood and some gross action with super glue. I won’t spoil the twist – you can search Google for that if you really want to know – but my dude figured it out less than halfway through the movie and I didn’t think he could be right.
I spent some time Googling ‘Goodnight Mommy theories’ and I found some really interesting ones on Reddit (a site I never use, I swear). It made me like the movie more, despite the gore. Though I will reiterate, the trailer is 100% misleading.
If nothing else, this movie is really good birth control.